On Monday, the co-author of the controversial new book "The Untold History of the United States" told PBS's Tavis Smiley, "Russia won it" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

TAVIS SMILEY, HOST: One of the things that you talk about in the book, and you’re inching closer to it now, is this notion of American exceptionalism that we’ve always been taught and that we heard again, Oliver Stone, from both sides in this campaign. Romney said it, Obama said it a variety of times in differing ways, but both continue to produce this notion of American exceptionalism.

OLIVER STONE: Why if we are a strong people which we should, united people, why do we have to always hear how great we are? What is this self-love? Where does this come from? And that’s what we’re exploring in there. And it got worse, because after the war, we thought we’d won it. That’s the first myth, the myth is. Frankly, Russia won it. The Soviet Union sacrificed far greater form than anyone else to win that war.

Secondly, we had the atomic bomb. We should not have dropped it on Japan. We did as an example to the Soviets not to defeat Japan and to save American lives. These are myths that we explode with a lot of research early on. But what results from it is this belief that we are always in the right, and it has gotten worse generation to generation till you got people like Romney and Bush walking around who really think they’re blessed, that they’re divine, that God’s intention is for the United States to rule the world.